Samsung hints next Galaxy S5 smartphone could include eye scanner

Do you like the idea of a smartphone that looks you squarely in the eye?

Samsung thinks you might, so it’s studying eye-scanning technology in hopes of building it into the Galaxy S5 smartphone by April, according to Bloomberg News. An iris sensor in the phone would scan a user’s eyes to unlock the device.

The next version of Samsung’s flagship handset is set to debut during the Mobile World Congress in February, as the company seeks to stay competitive and one-up rival Apple Inc.
/quotes/zigman/68270/delayed/quotes/nls/aaplAAPL whose iPhone 5S includes a fingerprint scanner.

Samsung also plans to update the display and cover of the Galaxy S5 to differentiate it from the S4, according to Lee Young Hee, executive vice president for Samsung’s mobile division, in an interview with Bloomberg News.

“Many people are fanatical about iris recognition technology,” he said in an interview at the CES conference in Las Vegas. “We are studying the possibility but can’t really say whether we will have it or not on the S5.”

It’s not the first time Samsung has explored iris-tracking technology. The Galaxy S4 watches a user’s eye movements to determine when to scroll a web page and lock a screen. Rumors about Samsung incorporating eye scanners into the S5 first surfaced in December last year.

Eye scanners take a high-contrast picture of a user’s pupil, iris, eyelids and eyelashes, and then translate that unique pattern into a code. The next time the user tries to unlock the phone, the scanner compares the eye scan to the original code.

Critics of biometrics — the measurement of physical characteristics such as fingerprints or DNA — have raised privacy concerns as personal technology moves to collect and analyze more of our behavior and biology. This year’s CES gets even more personal with tablets that analyze pupils to decipher what type of movie viewers would like to watch, wearable devices that monitor fitness, toothbrushes that track your brushing, and cars that respond to their owner’s voice.

Some question whether tech companies are storing and cataloging biometrics data and wonder if in the future that data will be shared like email addresses and phone numbers.

At any rate, Samsung is likely feeling the pressure to come back swinging in 2014 after posting a soft forecast for the year. On Tuesday, it estimated its fourth-quarter operating profit likely fell for the first time in more than two years, as smartphone sales momentum slowed amid intensifying competition from Apple and Chinese smartphone companies.

Up next in the biometrics-smartphone wars: voiceprints and vein geometry?

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